1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope

by Narendra Mehra

  After the Mutiny, there was an orgy of vengeance. England regarded the Mutiny as the fight between blacks and whites. The Evangelical Christians in London called the Hindu religion ‘rank filth’. They preached to take out the sword and cut the throat of Indian subjects by the thousands. And that is what they did. No one’s life was safe. Any man found alive was shot. The three sons of the King, Bahadur Shah Zaffar, were stripped and shot. Every tree and every building had a mutineer’s carcass. The route of the British retaliation force was lined with corpses hanging from the trees.

  The mutiny was followed by the India Act and the British Crown became the ruler of India. The Bengal army was marginalized, its artillery was dismantled and the ratio of European to Indian troops was increased.

  The Indian cities became virtual prisoners. Outside the walled cities, cantonments were built from where soldiers could mobilize at moment’s notice. For movement of troops, broad streets were opened through the inner city; buildings were demolished to remove cover, sufficient number of military outposts was established. No one was compensated for the demolished property. Broad boulevards provided the clear field of fire. After the mutiny, Britain built the foundation of its rule by military power. India became a fascist state and remained so, until the very end when a peaceful, non-violent freedom struggle pushed them out of the country.

  How did this loot & plunder help Britain? England built its infrastructure without the state making any investment. Much of it was financed with the profits of the companies operating in India. There were surpluses, the country expanded credits which lead to the growth of British industry & trade in the nineteenth century. The surplus capital made tremendous contributions to the construction of early railroad lines, and a whole new banking & borrowing system was developed. Britain became a banker to the world. There was so much money to be lent that they lent it beyond the limit of financial prudence. Britain had always been dependent on the sale & purchase of goods abroad. In the half century after 1850, after the Indian Mutiny & the annexation of India as a colony of the Crown, the Indian economy was exploited by the British, entirely for her own benefit, with the result that the British overseas trade increased rapidly, and with it her export of capital. There was sudden increase in the annual surpluses of the national balance of payments, which had averaged about five million pounds during the first half of the century. Those surpluses jumped to twenty five million pounds thereafter. The total British holdings abroad increased dramatically and doubled in a short span of a few years to billions of pounds in a matter of a few years. What a transformation of the British economy. It was zero sum game, India got very poor and Britain got very rich

  The Indian economic factor in favor of Britain led to the insanity of First and Second World Wars as Britain had nothing to lose. The blood and sweat of 350 million Indian slaves fueled their bravado. Britain survived because of India and for them; the loss of India would have been a mortal blow. Occupation of India by Britain and the survival of the Empire were borne out of that necessity and required the continuous subjugation and ransacking of the Indian economy. The outbreak of World War I saw a full confirmation of that dictum and resulted in further deterioration of the economic plight of India. Indian troops were sent to France, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Over one million men participated in the war effort and a hundred million pounds were taken out of India right away and additional thirty million pounds annually.

  The First World War

  India had nothing to do with the First World War but became a major contributor both in terms of money and manpower The First World War was a war between East & West; occident versus the orient; an ethnic conflict between Islam and Christianity. India was a secular country where all faiths, Hindus, Muslims Christians and the Buddhist lived in peace, whereas the fault lines of the war passed through Serbia. The British pushed the war to the Near East, relying on the Indian resources and profited from the war. The Western Europe changed little. The ratio of British national debt to its gross domestic product was not any different in 1918, at the end of the war, than a hundred years earlier in 1818. India became a tool of the British and was forced to provide money and manpower. When the guns finally ceased in 1918, sixty thousand Indian soldiers had died for the British nation, in the blood soaked battlefields of Middle East (Mesopotamia- now Iraq), Europe and East Africa. Indeed by 1918, India dispatched over a million and a half men to Europe, Middle East and Egypt and smaller contingents to Eden, East Africa, Gallipoli and Salonika.

  War and peace in other nations is generally accepted as a national fate. Nations defend their honor and their treaties and are decisive and honor bound. Not England, all it did was to squirm when the First World War broke out. Britain continuously looked for legalities to evade her commitments and wanted to make sure that her own exposure was at a minimum. When the Germans issued the ultimatum to Brussels on August second, it took her King less than three hours to take the decision. The choice was clear, resist or to surrender and he did not look for grey areas to dodge the issue. Not in England. When they were faced with the same decision to fulfill her treaty obligation to defend the French coast, the British looked for legalities to go back on her agreement with the French. Britain had no desire to honor her treaty obligation and looked for ways and means to back out of her commitment saying that they were not party to the Franco-Russian alliance. However, Britain had its trade routes to protect to India. While the Russians and the Germans were preparing for a short war, the British tactically prepared for an army of million for a war lasting years, based on Indian manpower. Britain’s own resources in 1914 were woefully inadequate against the twenty-four army divisions of Germany. With six divisions at home, England was no match to start a world war with Germany. Her motivation and bravado was based on the resources of colonial India. England by itself was out numbered both numerically as well as financially.

  In October 1914, two Indian corps disembarked in France. They were hurriedly equipped with machine guns, Lee Enfield .303 rifles and British field artillery before being shipped to the front. The result, as expected was disaster. Those corps was from the elite Indian martial race, the Gurkhas, the Sikhs and the Rajputs but untrained. They were stranger to trench warfare; they had never been trained in foreign artillery and none of them were manned by an Indian officer. There were no Indian commissioned officers in the Indian Army. The disaster in the trenches exposed the evil of race and prejudice as race and militarism was practiced by Britain to consolidate the British power in India. Indian forces were slaughtered in the trenches of France because of that prejudice and bigotry.

  When the Indian forces were coerced to go to France, the relationship between the Indian army and the British forces was corrosive. After the mutiny in 1857, the Indian troops were never entrusted with artillery and the British government had limited the number of Indian troops and increased the ratio of white to brown soldiers in India. The Indian soldiers manned the elephants and the British soldiers manned the artillery. Both looked over each other’s shoulder as no one trusted the other. However, the role of the army was modified to deflect Indian army from internal security to frontier warfare, but they were to be always subservient to the junior most British ensign. Indian soldiers therefore became cannon fodder in the French trenches on account of the limited training in modern weaponry and no leadership skills.

  The scale of contribution of the Indian army, fighting to defend the British security, was magnificent. They earned many decorations including several Victoria crosses. Additionally, India supplied about two hundred thousand animals, mainly mules and horses and four million tons of supplies and rations for a million men. By contrast, all of the other British dominions, including Britain itself could mobilize less than a million men. Britain said that it spent £10 billion on the war. Not entirely Britain’s money, India’s burden was counted as the British war expenditure.

  As the final insult to injury, is the Sigismund Goetz’s mural, “Britannia Pacifatrix” in the
British Foreign Office- Britannia stands shining radiantly, flanked on her left by four youthful figures, representing Britain’s white dominions and to her right by her allies France, United States and Greece. At Britannia’s feet, the children of the vanquished enemy are arrogantly shown to be repentant and hardly visible. Beneath the knees of the great white god is a little black boy carrying a basket of fruit- representing Africa’s contribution of coolies and porters There is no gratitude to India, without whose contribution, England might today be speaking German.

  A regional ethnic conflict in Bosnia was allowed to mushroom into a global conflict because Britain had nothing at stake. After the initial battle in France, where Britain did lose some soldiers, the conflict was pushed out of Europe so that the various powers of Europe could sort it out. In Europe, the various monarchies were related to each other by marriage; they were all intertwined as the progeny of Queen Victoria, their main goal was to expand the Empire at each other’s expense. Britain had the magic wand and could mobilize well over a million Indian men at the Front at no cost, which no other monarchy could match. The Kaiser who lost the most called the British “hating, lying conscienceless nation of shopkeepers”. The British came out of the war smelling like a rose.

  Britain became Imperial Britain and sought and conquered territories just for the heck of it, as it did not cost her anything. The imperial hubris had its perils and set in motion the decline of the empire and unleashed forces that ultimately collapsed it in the middle of the twentieth century.

  The Second World War

  India was the milch cow of the British. They milked her to death during the First World War and followed the same tactic during the Second. Why fight with success. As early as 1936, it was obvious to the European powers that there would soon be another world war. So, the British feverishly started expanding the Indian army and building the infrastructure for war in India at Indian expense. The Indian army was expanded to ten times its normal size. The British needed time, so the famous strategy of appeasement. The Anglo-Centric historians have written volumes about this appeasement that was hypocrisy as they knew well about the military preparations under way in India; only the rest of the world was kept in the dark as a deliberate policy of the British. Baldwin and Chamberlain were criticized for inaction, but the facts are to the contrary. One thing was certain; the British did not want to spend their own dime for the war. The Chancellor of the Exchequer fretted about the drain from the exchequer of £150 million when the people started pulling money from the British Treasury on war rumors. The chancellor did not release money for the war preparations either. Milk the Indian cow that was his story line. It will be hard to find any reference in the British history books about the contributions India made for the world wars. The Germans knew the Indian factor in favor of Britain. The deck was stacked against the Germans and the Japanese. Churchill had a smirk on his cigar chewing face when he flashed those ‘V’ victory signs during the blitzkrieg; He knew that there was no way Britain was going to lose the war, with the resources of India at its disposal.

  After the sacrifices India made during the First World War, India was granted some representation for home rule. Montague termed it ‘progressive realization of responsible government in India’. They were telling Indians to aspire for freedom but keep serving the British interests. Fancy story line, they even built the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi that looked like a miniature British House of Commons, right down to the green leather chairs. At the crunch time, that hollow power got totally exposed; it was representation without power. The green leather chairs were lollipops. The viceroy announced India’s entry into the war on the radio without a word of consultation with the leaders of the Indian National Congress. India’s role was crucial in the defeat of the Axis powers but Britain had taken India for granted as it was an occupied country.

  The day Churchill announced that Britain was at war with Germany, the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow informed India over the radio of the circumstances in which “we find ourselves at war with Germany today”. That announcement set off a political firestorm. The Indian National congress rejected his declaration. The Home Secretary for India in London declared that India was a hostile and an occupied country.

  That declaration was however no surprise to India as feverish activity for the war had been going on in India since 1936. During the Second World War, India was the major assault base and housed thousands of men (British and American) and built close to fifty million square feet of covered storage area. There was a major construction effort to make seven new air bases to accommodate United States transport planes for delivering supplies to China and over two hundred new airfields. India built training facilities to take up to half a million men. India supplied vast quantities of food and supplies to the allied forces all over the world. India was the sole supplier of jungle green uniforms and battle dress worn in Burma. India contributed two and a half million professional soldiers, sailors and airmen and participated in combat. India suffered about twenty five thousand casualties and another about one hundred thousand were wounded and another similar numbered were taken as prisoners of war. India was the largest contributor to the British war effort. India fought in Malaya, Burma, East Africa, North Africa, Tunisia, the Middle East, Sicily and Italy. The British Army in Burma became the largest single army in the world with one million men, out of which three fourth were Indians. The British said that 2.5 million men in India volunteered for the war; hostile people do not volunteer; they were forcefully scripted.

  Indian masses suffered too. The food was diverted for the war effort and India suffered a massive famine in 1942 and three million people lost their lives. Churchill said that the Indian slaves were expendable for the safety and well being of the Empire. Those who did not die suffered severe malnutrition. The food, clothing and kerosene were rationed and people could not get grain and cereals beyond minimum subsistence levels. The daily ration was no more than four ounce of cereals. Many young, old and children perished.

  India provided supplies to the United States worth about half a billion dollars. India built up a credit balance of billion plus dollars against Britain after wiping out any debt that Britain said India owed. Britain circulated various figures of debt that India owed it but did it ever send any money to India? After the United States entered the war, the British sort of peeled off except for some air power, the war became a war between the United States, Germany, Russia, India and Japan. The British kept a tight grip on its purse strings. The money only went into British treasury during the Raj; it seldom, if ever went out. India spent a huge amount on the war with little knowledge of what Britain spent other than providing intelligence.

  The devastation in India on account of the war was synonymous with atrocities like the Holocaust and Hiroshima; it was also synonymous with the British rape of India. The British created famines and the partition of India caused the loss of life, which pales the death on account of other atrocities in the world like the genocide of Armenians by the Turks or the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the rape and death of the Chinese by the Japanese or the forced marches of American prisoners of war by the Japanese or the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

  India was the key to solving the financial woes of the British. The British had come to realize that without India, they would remain a third rate island nation. They did succeed, they tried to craft an image of a super power based on justice and rule of law, but their actions exposed their true intent, they were cruel and despotic. They were left behind in the European race for money and power. They were drunk on power, imperial temptation lead to excesses throughout their rule; the relation between the colonizer and the colonized was troubling and their entire rule was hypocritical. They lost the trust of the people and in the end, the people over threw the Empire. One can build something based on hypocrisy only so long, because that artifact would be brittle, fragile and structurally unsound. In the end, when the natives rose up in revolt, the British were ambival
ent, they blew hot and cold, they tried to appease and they used the bullets. Their past and their actions eventually caught up with them. That was the price of overweening greed. India paid a huge price too; India was indolent, lost millions of its people to Imperial famines and militarism, its wealth plundered and its people set back by two centuries. Mirror of history taught India to be suspicious of others. India was closed to the outside world for about half a century after its Independence in 1947.

  Gandhi illuminated the path to a peaceful non-violent struggle and the next and the final chapter sums up the Herculean effort of ordinary people to push the British out of the country and out of their lives.

  CHAPTER NINTH:

  DISASTROUS END

  The British rule in India ended ingloriously for Britain and tragically for India. Their end game was to keep India subjugated as long as they could. As a result, they continued to shift ground and were unwilling to agree to any resolution of the native demand for total freedom. In the process, they sacrificed the safety and the security of the natives and inflicted further pain and suffering with total selfish abandon. The impact of their rule, even after they were gone, continued to reverberate adversely for decades to come compounding the misery of their rule. In the end all they cared for was their own self-interest, which was to rake in as much money as they could and as long as they could and it became critical for them on account of the two world wars. Their exit came after a very protracted struggle when the native resolve, resentment and nationalism boiled over. The exit was treacherous and destructive.

  Britain had become accustomed to depending on India for its Imperial glory, resulting from the huge revenue stream, a vast market for its manufactured goods and the manpower for militarism and wars. Imperial Britain also became used to the vast pool of Indian manpower for ruling its far-flung colonies and to fight her wars, as it had a small army of its own. India had become British garrison for its armed forces. In the end, in exchange for freedom, the British Prime Minister Lord Clement Atlee wanted an agreement from India to continue to supply the manpower for the British armed forces. It was a totally cynical, humiliating and unacceptable condition which dragged the freedom struggle to a costly and tragic conclusion. In the process, India’s vitality and resources were sapped, centuries old Hindu- Muslim unity destroyed, the dignity of her people stripped. The Indians fought back in a very non-violent struggle to get rid of the foreign yoke as they lost total faith in the British negotiating positions. Imperial Britain did all that to the Indian masses knowing fully well that Britain was answerable to none and could get away with anything.